Critical Essay by David B. Suchoff

In the following essay, Suchoff contends that Thoreau sought to understand the mystery of nature through friendship rather than language.

“It is difficult to begin without borrowing,” Thoreau tells us as he relates the borrowing of an ax to found his cabin at Walden, “but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow men to have an interest in your enterprise.”1 The project of Walden, promising to take the writer to the “necessary of life” (7), and at the same time to make him matutine, capable of pure origin like the morning, begins already in debt. “All...